Writers and Editors (Pat McNees's blog)

Pat McNees, updated 12-29-18
More recent (but not necessarily most useful or interesting) entries at top:
• Meet the KGB Spies Who Invented Fake News (Adam B. Ellick, Adam Westbrook and Jonah M. Kessel, video opinion, NY Times, 11-12-18) Episode 1 of Operation InfeKtion, revealing reveal how one of the biggest fake news stories ever concocted — the 1984 AIDS-is-a-biological-weapon hoax — went viral in the pre-Internet era. Meet the KGB cons who invented it, and the “truth squad” that quashed it. For a bit.. See also The Seven Commandments of Fake News (11-13-18) The Pizzagate playbook: Same tactics, new technologies. How the seven rules of Soviet disinformation are being used to create today’s fake news stories. Pizza anyone?
• Rick Gates Sought Online Manipulation Plans From Israeli Intelligence Firm for Trump Campaign (Mark Mazzetti, Ronen Bergman, David D. Kirkpatrick and Maggie Haberman, NY Times, 10-8-18) Trump campaign aide Rick Gates expressed interest in an Israeli company’s proposal for a social media manipulation effort, requesting proposals from the company to create fake online identities, use social media manipulation, and gather intelligence to help defeat Republican primary race opponents and Hillary Clinton. The Trump campaign’s interest in the work began as Russians were escalating their effort to aid Donald J. Trump. Though the Israeli company’s pitches were narrower than Moscow’s interference campaign and appear unconnected, the documents show that a senior Trump aide saw the promise of a disruption effort to swing voters in Mr. Trump’s favor.
• Truth, Disrupted (Sinan Aral, Harvard Business Review, July 2018) False news spreads online faster, farther, and deeper than truth does — but it can be contained. Successfully fighting the spread of falsity will require four interrelated approaches — educating the players, changing their incentives, improving technological tools, and (the right amount of) governmental oversight — and the answers to five key questions."
****Catalogue of all projects working to solve Misinformation and Disinformation (Shane Greenup, MisinfoCon, 6-9-18) Starts with The Disinformation Index (rating the probability of a source carrying disinformation).
• MisinfoCon ( a community of people focused on the challenge of #misinformation & what can be done to address it. Events so far at MIT, London and Kyiv--DC in August)
• rbutr (tells you when the webpage you are viewing has been disputed, rebutted or contradicted elsewhere on the internet).Get the plugin.
• Credibility Coalition An interdisciplinary community committed to improving our information ecosystems and media literacy through transparent and collaborative exploration. Tackling the misinformation problem successfully will require a holistic approach, with reputation systems, fact-checking, media literacy, revenue models, and public feedback all helping to address the health of the information ecosystem."
• Teaching in the Age of Trump (Andrea Rinard, Medium, 7-13-18) Five tenets for navigating alternative facts and ad hominem attacks in the classroom: 1. Kids need to learn how to be more responsible and canny media consumers. 2. We must create safe spaces and insist on civility. And so on, with stories from the classroom.
• Journalists can change the way they build stories to create organic news fluency (Tom Rosenstiel and Jane Elizabeth, American Press Institute, 5-9-18) "We propose a new way of creating journalism that helps audiences become more fluent and more skilled consumers of news the more they consume it....imagine a format or presentation that, alongside the story, poses some key questions a discriminating or “fluent” news consumer might ask to decide what to make of the story." They might ask: What is new here? What evidence is there? What sources did you talk to and when? What facts don't we know yet? What, if anything, is still in dispute? ...Imagine if more journalists were to raise and answer these questions in an element placed at the top of the narrative."
• The enduring appeal of conspiracy theories ( Melissa Hogenboom, BBC, 1-24-18) While some conspiracy theories are largely harmless, others have damaging ripple-effects. With new insights, researchers are getting closer to understanding why so many people believe things which are not true.
• Center for a New American Security. See, for example, Behind The Magical Thinking: Lessons from Policymaker Relationships with Drones (7-31-18)
• He Predicted the 2016 Fake News Crisis. Now He's Worried About an Information Apocalypse. (Charlie Warzel, BuzzFeed, 2-11-18) "In mid-2016, Aviv Ovadya realized there was something fundamentally wrong with the internet — so wrong that he abandoned his work and sounded an alarm. A few weeks before the 2016 election, he presented his concerns to technologists in San Francisco’s Bay Area and warned of an impending crisis of misinformation in a presentation he titled 'Infocalypse.' The web and the information ecosystem that had developed around it was wildly unhealthy, Ovadya argued. The incentives that governed its biggest platforms were calibrated to reward information that was often misleading and polarizing, or both. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google prioritized clicks, shares, ads, and money over quality of information, and Ovadya couldn’t shake the feeling that it was all building toward something bad — a kind of critical threshold of addictive and toxic misinformation."
• How the Left Lost Its Mind (Katie Martin, The Atlantic, 7-2-17)The Republicans do not have a monopoly on fake news."The Trump era has given rise to a vast alternative left-wing media infrastructure that operates largely out of the view of casual news consumers, but commands a massive audience and growing influence in liberal America. There are polemical podcasters and partisan click farms; wild-eyed conspiracists and cynical fabulists.Some traffic heavily in rumor and wage campaigns of misinformation; others are merely aggregators and commentators who have carved out a corner of the web for themselves. But taken together, they form a media universe where partisan hysteria is too easily stoked, and fake news can travel at the speed of light."
• How and why to spot and identify fake news (Pat McNees, Writers and Editors)
• A century ago, progressives were the ones shouting ‘fake news’ (Matthew Jordan, The Conversation, 2-1-18) As a rhetorical strategy for eroding trust in the media, the term dates back to the end of the 19th century. Righteous "muckrakers were usually the ones deploying the term. They sought to challenge the growing numbers of powerful newspapers that were concocting fake stories to either sell papers or advance the interests of their corporate benefactors. "
• We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here's What We Learned (Laura Sydell, All Tech Considered, NPR, 11-23-16) During the run-up to the presidential election, fake news really took off. "It was just anybody with a blog can get on there and find a big, huge Facebook group of kind of rabid Trump supporters just waiting to eat up this red meat that they're about to get served," (more…)

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Godwin's Law: ""As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches"
~ Mike Godwin, creator of Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies, fearing glib use of the term will dilute the meaning of "Never Again"